Why is it bad to just pull out a USB?

Every one that sees me just pull out of a USB from a computer tells me that is not good for the computer, that i have to go to the USB icon and stop the data transfer. My question is does it really damage the computer of the USB?

Update: By the USB I mean a USB flash drive.

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Best Answer: It CAN damage your computer (or your data) but it's highly unlikely. The problem with just pulling the drive straight from the computer is that while your flash drive is plugged into your computer, it's treated as a removable drive. As such, as long as it's in the computer, data can (and sometimes is) transferred without you knowing it. Unplugging it can cause data loss or corruption. Though, so long as you're sure the active transfers (like saving a word document to the drive, or copy and pasting things into it) are done, it's highly unlikely anything bad will happen.

It will not damage your computer.
However, windows provides caching for read and write operations. Thus, it might be a case that there is some data still written to usb drive, and it would corrupt information there. Also, theoretically your usb drive could get shock by just pulling out.

For windows, its ONLY bad if there are files transferring to/from the flash drive. (people assume its ALWAYS bad, they're dumb)
Macs I'm not too sure of (pretty sure the same rules apply but maybe Mac constantly reads off of the drive so it may cause errors and require to format the drive)